English Rose Kitchen

50m2 of wood makes a great makeshift worksurface

I’ll be the first to admit that some of the articles on this blog have veered wildly off topic. There have been two reasons for this. Firstly it’s taken an embarrassingly long time for us to get things moving and secondly writing about a kitchen renovation is fundamentally boring and I dare say it’s not much more fun to read about it.

So this is probably of interest only to us, but we finally took delivery of 50m2 of engineered, unfinished oak this week. Currently sitting in what was the kitchen and will be the exercise area, Wifey, as ever, did a fantastic job of researching it and getting a great price.

We initially decided we wanted a harlequin design on the floor, but realised it would be too difficult, so we spent days driving around town looking at some amazing wood at fantastic (in the sense of fantasy) prices upwards of £100 a square metre. Then we thought we wanted something called double smoke white oiled or double oiled white smoked or whatever, but much like we just “knew” when we’d found the kitchen units we were going for, we knew we really wanted a harlequin floor.

That’s why we ended up with unfinished oak. It had to be engineered because we wanted it wide and the underlying flooring is crap. The technique we’re going to use was dreamt up by wifey. We’re going to get our chippie to rout out grooves to make it look like we have square wood tiles lain at 45 degrees, then stain or oil (open to suggestion) alternate squares light and dark, finishing off with a couple of layers of clear oil.

Now all we need to do is to get the rest of our damned STUFF into storage so that they can lay the floor in the first place!

If I’m honest though, I’m much more excited about our toilet that arrives on Tuesday. No it’s not one of those Japanese ones that analyses your stool and emails your doctor for you, but it does have one of those funky modern lids that you let go of an watch it gently lower itself.

An example of the craftsmanship for which this country is renowned

This country has always been well known for its craftsmen. Traditionally tradespeople have been trained as apprentices and considered themselves at least in part, artisans as well. I’ve long known that certain corners were cut in earlier work carried out on our flat, but this renovation has revealed an astonishing litany of howlers. Once more we don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

There’s an easy way and then there’s a quick way to make a hole in a wall through which to feed the outlet pipe from a sink. The quick way, which on removing the old kitchen units we discovered had been used, seems to involve a pickaxe straight through the wall. Astonishing!

If it hadn’t been for the fact that the flat above constantly leaks onto us we might never have re plastered the ceiling, which means that we’d have missed that a)the ceiling is too fragile to take the lighting we’d originally planned and b) the cavity was filled with newspapers, or, as C called it “tinder”.

The cavity is filled with a quality broadsheet

We took C upstairs to have a look around because he was concerned that our neighbour might have applied the same techniques to his bathroom that he had to installing the shower in our place. We have suffered the odd indoor water feature in the room below that houses our computers.

He and our plumber were horrified to see how the boiler had been installed. Apparently the pipe coming out of a boiler is supposed to feed straight into the sewer, because its contents are acidic. When they installed the pipe upstairs, they prised up part of the lead flashing on our roof (charming!), thus reducing its ability to keep out rain, which isn’t that great to start with due to the way it was fixed.

The pipe then … stops! Yes, that’s right, it stops on our roof and feeds into our gutter. The acidic fluid from the pipe will be corroding the lead and then the gutter, before overflowing into our next door neighbour’s garden, potentially poisoning our cat along the way.